"Writing advertising copy, which I learned largely from the great David Ogilvy, taught me not to waffle, and to use facts instead of purple prose when describing something," says Peter Mayle over a glass of red.

"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life." Said Samuel Johnson. My father, the author Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch-22, which turns 50 years old today, was tired of neither. He died in 1999, at the age of seventy-six. To say that he was a complex man, is akin to saying that the Empire State Building is tall. He was sometimes brash, sometimes coy, disturbingly cryptic, but about the UK he was none of those things. In fact, he may have loved England more than any place on earth.